Do you guys remember Fyre Fest?
You know, the supposed greatest festival of all time that left tons of influencers and trust fund kids stranded on some remote Bahamas island with no food, water, toilets, or way to get home when the whole thing turned out to be a massive scam?
The one that tons of massive celebrities and influencers promoted on their platforms to give it credibility, despite there being no infrastructure to house that many people or provisions to feed them?
The whole thing was a total sh*tshow that ended up being a massive scam organized by a rich kid named Billy McFarland, who was trying to promote his “talent booking app” Fyre.
But he eventually ran out of money, and had no experience putting on a festival, so the end result was a bunch of rich millennials got to the Bahamas and found out they would be sleeping in FEMA tents and eating cheese sandwiches with no actual music because all of the headliners pulled out after not being paid.
McFarland ended up being charged with wire fraud, sentenced to 6 years in prison and ordered to pay back $26 million that he had defrauded from investors.
He also later used the email list of potential Fyre Fest goers to scam them out of “tickets” (which did not exist) for VIP events like the Met Gala and Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. (He only served some of this sentence, was released to a halfway house in 2022 on good behavior and his time on house arrest ended the same year.)
Well he’s out of prison now, and trying to come up with new ways to make money after the first one didn’t go so well.
So why not throw a music festival?
Yeah, tickets for the second edition of Fyre Festival just went on sale, and it was announced by none other than Billy McFarland.
To add further confusion to this absolutely outrageous idea, the festival is being marketed with very few details (sound familiar?), simply saying that it will take place at the end of 2024 in the Caribbean. No line up has been announced or even talked about. Tickets range in price from $499 to $7,999.
Let’s take a look at the video he posted to social media, where he talks about how this event came together while in a seven month stint in solitary confinement.
According to the festival’s website, the first 100 tickets have been sold (which could be a marketing scheme), but that would mean he’s already taken in $49,900.
I obviously have lots to say about this (the first being just why?), but how about we check in on the good people of X (or Twitter, if that’s what you still want to call it) to get their reaction, shall we?
Yep, it’s going pretty much as well as expected.
Quite honestly, even if this festival does happen for some unbelievable reason, no one should buy tickets simply because of how awful of a person this guy is. Entirely unremorseful about ruining countless lives, endangering many more, stealing people’s money based on fake and knowingly false promises, I mean I can just go on and on…
How in the world he’s able to get away with this I’ll never know, and it certainly seems like a failure of the legal system that he’s allowed to go back into this very same position.
On second thought, maybe this will be the best festival ever… Should I get tickets?
